Sorry If this is the wrong board and/or Forum.

For awhile I have been doing a lot of test/learning development on my virtual box while at home on my main (gaming) rig.

However, since my rig will go to sleep while idle, it actually shuts down connections to my virtual box and when it does come back up, I am unable to reconnect to the network on the VM without having to restart the VM.

I got my hands on a HP tower, I will use this as a dedicated server.

I got a tone of software and settings setup on my VM OS that I cannot afford to lose.

I want to convert this VM so that can be used as a physical OS.


I am running Virtualbox 5... The Linux OS is CentOS 6.6.

For the most part a virtual machine is a real machine. You'd take steps to clone or move a system just like you would a physical to physical. Unique names need to be edited before you move to generic or edited later. Some drivers may need to be adjusted or added in later or before the move.

You might try some distro like clonezilla to copy to a usb drive maybe then move to the new host.

Many people like the command dd and pipe it to gz to a file then dd it back to the new host. G4U would do that basically.

Since your distro has a ton of free information you should look up ways to clone Centos or RH or Fedora for ideas.

There are V2P programs out there too.

You could boot your vm from a live iso image and then use netcat over to your networked live booted host too.

Really many many ways to do what you want.

Thanks for the replies. I did come to the idea of cloning it, since I had to do that once to upgrade my main HDD a month ago for storage.

You actually sparked an idea I'm surprised I didn't see before.
I'm wondering if it would work out for me to just install a Clean CentOS 6.6, and then copy files over from the other machine overwriting any if necessary.


I guess this gives me something to work on when I get off work. I'll update this board again after my testing

A clean install is the best, generally, however you'd need to know the packages you installed and how you installed and configured them. If all the software came from a package manager then you can usually get a list or automate it's replication.

First I need to find out how to get this installation to work.

Maybe I can create a live DVD at work tomorrow.
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EDIT 2/24/2016:

I took the HDD to work and created the DVDs and got it up and running. I've set up the network as-well as vncserver with Desktops.

I will transfer over my data from the VM and see what happens.

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Well I got it up and running from scratch. I've installed a few things and made some changes here and there. Once I got a good foundation I started copying over the important things such as all scripts in /bin and ~/bat/

I've copied over the files such as .bashrc, .env, .bash_profile, etc. I also copied some of the databases. Things are looking good.


I did receive an error "dcop no found" with one of the scripts, I'm not sure how many more scripts use that, but the script I found it in was using it in a non essential way, so I commented it out.

The moment of truth is when I take this HDD come to try to stick in the correct PC.

It may take time and usage to see if everything is working correctly, but as an overview, things are working.



I finally had the time to mess with the .env and set it to use $(whoami)@$SYSNAME instead of $LOGNAME@$SYSNAME. This allows me to get the username on the display to change when I "su" back and forth

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Cloning it would have been a good exercise too.